A quad is a unit of energy equal to (a
short-scale
The long and short scales are two of several naming systems for integer powers of ten which use some of the same terms for different magnitudes.
For whole numbers smaller than 1,000,000,000 (109), such as one thousand or one million, the ...
quadrillion
Two naming scales for large numbers have been used in English and other European languages since the early modern era: the long and short scales. Most English variants use the short scale today, but the long scale remains dominant in many non-Eng ...
)
BTU
The British thermal unit (BTU or Btu) is a unit of heat; it is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. It is also part of the United States customary units. The modern SI u ...
, or (1.055 exajoules or EJ) in
SI units.
The unit is used by the
U.S. Department of Energy in discussing world and national energy budgets. The
global primary energy production in 2004 was 446 quad, equivalent to 471 EJ.
Conversion
Some common types of an
energy carrier
An energy carrier is a substance (fuel) or sometimes a phenomenon (energy system) that contains energy that can be later converted to other forms such as mechanical work or heat or to operate chemical or physical processes.
Such carriers includ ...
approximately equal to 1 quad are:
* of gasoline
*
*293.07 terawatt-hours (TWh)
*33.434 gigawatt-years (GWy)
*36,000,000 tonnes of coal
*970,434,000,000 cubic feet of natural gas
*5,996,000,000 UK gallons of diesel oil
*25,200,000 tonnes of oil
*252,000,000 tonnes of TNT or five times the energy of the
Tsar Bomba
The Tsar Bomba () ( code name: ''Ivan'' or ''Vanya''), also known by the alphanumerical designation "AN602", was a thermonuclear aerial bomb, and the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created and tested. Overall, the Soviet physicist Andrei Sa ...
nuclear test
*12.69 tonnes of
uranium-235
Uranium-235 (235U or U-235) is an isotope of uranium making up about 0.72% of natural uranium. Unlike the predominant isotope uranium-238, it is fissile, i.e., it can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. It is the only fissile isotope that exis ...
(with 83.14 TJ/kg)
*6 s sunlight reaching Earth
See also
*
Units of energy
Energy is defined via Mechanical work, work, so the SI unit of energy is the same as the unit of work – the joule (J), named in honour of James Prescott Joule and his experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat. In slightly more fundame ...
*
Orders of magnitude (energy)
This list compares various energies in joules (J), organized by order of magnitude.
Below 1 J
1 to 105 J
106 to 1011 J
1012 to 1017 J
1018 to 1023 J
Over 1023 J
}
, -
, 1050
,
, ≳1050 J
, Upper limit of 'apparent'/isotropic energy ...
References
{{measurement-stub
Units of energy